New Tool To Help Scientists Promote Their Papers

Author: Charlotte Anthony | Category: Opportunities | August 04, 2016

A free new tool called "Kudos" was featured in Nature Magazine for its ability to maximize reach and impact of research.

Kudos gives each research paper its own profile page, which users can flesh out with a plain-language summary, external resources, reviews, presentations and more.

Users also create their own overall profile page, which can automatically pull in data from research-profiling services such as ORCID.

To help researchers promote their work to others, Kudos also provides its users with trackable URLs, which they can send out by e-mail, Twitter, Facebook or other social-media platforms. Kudos tallies the resulting clicks — allowing researchers, as well as institutional press offices and funding agencies, to look at which outlets produce the best return on investment, says co-founder Charlie Rapple in the article.

"Kudos's support for displaying plain-language summaries, which researchers can write to make their articles accessible to a wider audience, is particularly useful," Greg Tananbaum, who owns the California-based ScholarNext consultancy and focuses on scholarly communication and academic technology issues said in the article. "The family members of someone with cancer, for example, may be better able to understand the context and significance of a medical study from a simple description than from the published abstract."

Since its launch in May 2014, the website's user base has grown to more than 100,000 users with around 4,000 sign-ups each month.